The Idea

The idea was to determine if isopsephia, word-numbers, or gematria was used to create the Phaistos disk and it's corresponding hieroglyphic writing system. The ancient reference of the existence of a Palamedian alphabet consisting of 16 letters, brought to mind the possibility of the existence of an older alphabet of 15 letters. This because in the Linear B syllabic writing system the R sound is not differentiated in regards to the L sound. Since the Phaistos disk seems to be a product of an advanced civilization, if we consider the possibility it was planned so that a decoding can be possible in the future, we must agree that its writing system, its phonetic - alphabetic structure should be governed by uniformity. This led to the formulation of a combination of letters from an early alphabet creating syllables similar in a lot of ways to the Linear B scripts but in a more uniform way. The idea is that no syllables of this writing system should have been left out of the Phaistos disk.

Knowing now the Phaistos syllable array I had to tackle the difficult issue of correlating hieroglyphs to respective phonetic values. Having read Tsikritsis two books on Linear A and the Phaistos disk, I chose 20 symbols from the Linear B correlation table by internal reading, page 113 of his book. To this I added the assignment of the plumed head to the vowel 'Ε' that exists in the tables of arrangement and correlation of the Disk with the Linear A and B archives that Tsikristis presents on pages 105 and 108 of his book.

Due to the fact that Tsikritsis was not able to propose a phonetic value based on statistical analysis for all symbols, I studied Polygiannaki's propositions and based on the isopsephia structure of the text I chose 9 of her phonetic - hieroglyphic assignments. Polygiannaki bases her assignments on acrophony. The idea that isopsephia was used was confirmed based on multiple calculations of an important repetitive part of the text. This included the place name Phaistos.

For the rest of the hieroglyphs I presented my own phonetic values. A couple were actually Tsikritsis values transformed to fit my own hieroglyphic design idea. The rest were derived solely using isopsephia analysis that takes into account scientific and religious parameters. A C computer program was created and all relative combinations were run so as to lead to the best isopsephia fit.

The actual translation effort started only after the best possible phonetic values were derived. Confirmative mathematical(statistical and other), or isopsephia relations that relate to physical constants showed me that the phonetic solution was the right one, or at least a very good one - one very close to the ideal.

An ancient script decoding can only be valid if evidence exists that a relevant translation in a specific language makes sense, in other words that it is not gibberish. This prerequisite was impressively fulfilled so it seems that the mystery of the Phaistos disk has come to an end. It has now been positively decoded.